Evolving independent pharmacy

This week, Cardinal Health is celebrating 25 years hosting its annual Retail Business Conference meeting. Before the show, Drug Store News sat down with Steve Lawrence, SVP of Independent Sales for Cardinal Health, and Christi Pedra, SVP of Marketing and Consumer Solutions, at Cardinal Health, to get a sense of the value independents will get from this year’s RBC.

DSN: How has the role of the retail independent changed?

Lawrence: The role of the retail independent [has] been evolving for several years now. They are being pushed to practice at the top of their license. They moved from filling scripts to immunizations over the last few years. In several states, we’re starting to see where pharmacists are actually prescribing. … They’re moving dramatically to be a healthcare destination, instead of just a pharmacy where you go and pick up your scripts. They’re moving their stores [more] into health and wellness.

DSN: As far as provider status, what is Cardinal Health doing to help push that piece of legislation along?

Lawrence: We’re working really hard at the state level. We also offer customers a Legislative Toolkit where they can go in and can see all of the legislation that’s out there. They can focus on the prescriber status legislation and get with their legislators — they can write them, call them, have them visit their stores. The store visits are very helpful in that vein. We’re also working very closely with NCPA and APhA on their initiatives. … It’s a state- but also a national-level effort the pharmacy profession is putting on the provider status legislation.

DSN: What are some of the new tools and solutions at RBC?

Pedra: We’re really excited about what we’re doing around our Adherence Advantage suite of solutions, which encourages compliance and adherence at the patient level. We have consumer adherence products, like Dispill, which is multi-dose packaging, and we have medication therapy management, our own network solution that offers assistance to our retail pharmacies in completing MTM cases. At the store-level, we continue to enhance our Reimbursement Consulting Solutions, which our customers refer to as RCS. We’ve made improvements with that, and we’re going to show some improved capabilities with our dashboard and reporting capabilities. Another area of importance for our retail independents is being a high-performing pharmacy. We have a huge program around Reach for the Stars. It’s another important element of how we go about helping the pharmacies improve the quality of care and allow them to be more empowered to deal with patient engagement.

DSN: One of the things that Steve mentioned was that the independent pharmacy is quickly evolving into a healthcare destination center. Can you talk more about that and discuss some of the front-end programs that Cardinal offers?

Pedra: We have some new vendors and new product offerings that our pharmacists and attendees can review at RBC. We are also . launching a co-branding initiative for Medicine Shoppe and Medicap pharmacies. Both of these pharmacies have a great reputation for supporting the wellness of our patients. We are also trying, from our front-end perspective, to help our retail independents be better retailers, better merchandisers and learn more about front-end strategies that help them carry the right products for their customers, based on, let’s say, certain disease states — such as diabetes care. We can help them identify appropriate lines of over-the-counter products that can support their businesses and support patient wellness. In addition, vitamins are very important for retail independents. Nutriceuticals are coming up — these are all great areas for them to explore.

DSN: Cardinal Health recently launched the Order Express mobile app. Can you talk about the features of that app?

Pedra: Order Express is our e-commerce platform, and this new app gives customers the ability to place orders from their personal device. So [our customers] never have to rent or purchase expensive ordering scanners. It’s really convenient to use, it’s compatible with the Apple iPhone and Android devices, and you just download the app like you would any other app. We are excited about it. … We see this as not only convenient for our customers to use, but also a major cost-savings to them.

DSN: Steve, we heard you earlier in the week at the Business Advantage panel discussion emphasizing the importance of long-term care. Can you talk more about the opportunities in the long-term care market?

Lawrence: Long-term care is an area retail independents have been in for a long time. … One of the things that Christi talked about is Dispill, our compliance packaging. We’ve got a lot of customers that are doing compliance packaging now, and they’re seeing the growth of taking that compliance packaging into group homes and into assisted living. We’ve put a really robust package together on our Order Express platform to allow customers to identify where the long-term care customers are in their area. We havepresentations for them on how to talk to the long-term care facility [and] give them some advice on how to build a business plan for getting into long-term care. [It’s] basically a soup-to-nuts Long-term Care 101 of how you go from a retail pharmacy to a long-term care facility. It’s a great growth avenue for them to continue to diversify from just filling prescriptions.